The Kitchen Staple You'll Want To Use On Your Lawn Mower

Nothing says home like a sweet patch (or a luxurious expanse) of healthy emerald grass welcoming people as they approach your house. Regardless of your lawn's size, if you're doing your own lawn care and have invested in a mower, you know it's time-consuming, though rewarding, to make it look beautiful. If you're a new homeowner (or even if you're not), you might want to take a few minutes to check if you're using the right lawn mower for your grass to ensure you have the right tools. 

Gardening and maintaining a lawn takes time and repeated weekly effort for most of the year. The last thing you want is for your mower's undercarriage to get compacted with clumps of grass clippings, which choke out and then stall your machine. Luckily, there's a way you can prevent potential stalling by using a simple kitchen staple you most likely already have on hand: cooking spray. But even using this hack, your best practices should include occasionally cleaning out grass from under your mower. However, you can still significantly cut down on how often you need to do this with a preventative spritz of cooking spray.

Gather your supplies. You'll want to, of course, have your mower turned completely off; disconnect the spark plug. Lay it on its side so the undercarriage is exposed. Perhaps choose to work in a location near a gutter. Get from your kitchen (or purchase) a can or bottle of cooking spray. A bottle of olive oil won't do it, but any vegetable oil propelled through a spray mechanism is perfect. Get your garden gloves out, too.

Lawn Love explains that you can opt to simply spray the undercarriage with the cooking spray if you just want to prevent clogging grass. But using the spray in conjunction with water from your hose and a scraping tool will guarantee the best clean, in addition to preventing future clogging.

To restore your lawn mower to sparkling, grass-free condition, the first step is to turn on your hose and carefully direct the water to remove as much compacted grass as you can from underneath the machine. After you turn off the water, if you prefer to wear gloves near the mower blades, put them on. Use a scraping utensil (a putty knife works) to dislodge grass from the blades and sides. Finally, give the now-clean undercarriage a spritz of cooking spray.

Using cooking spray is a fabulous hack for keeping grass from clumping up and compacting under your mower. What we love about it is that it's completely non-toxic to the grass and chemical-free. Your grass might wonder if it's about to become an ingredient in a stir-fry, but that's the only issue you may come across.

In addition to using cooking spray, we recommend a few additional best practices to help reduce grass accumulation. It's important that you never mow the lawn when it's wet. Even if there was no rain overnight, there is often morning dew; you should wait until that's dried out and mow later in the day. You don't want to risk electrocution, and damp grass is guaranteed to clump up and cause a blockage in your machine. Another tip: Keep your mower blades sharp to cut the grass efficiently and avoid clumping. Look out for the signs that your lawn mower needs to get fixed by a professional, and if your machine is beyond repair, consider upgrading to a better machine.